BOE Meeting Oct 21 2021

001is thank you did you press the record button james so it's seven o'clock and i'd like to call our board we need to order mr robson will you please call the roll dr demarco yeah mr reckon here please join us for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everyone for your attendance here in person and virtually we appreciate your participation and go browns right fingers crossed everyone stays not injured we'll start with our pta council report um mrs prugar you know what would you mind coming to maybe the i know but for our virtual uh members we'd love thank you so much okay is this

002better yes thank you so much all right so as always if you're interested in joining pta uh you can check out the district website and click on the pta link on the side and all the units are on there um last month i reported that we had 650 pta members and currently we have 1754 which is amazing our membership vps are killing it we still have some membership drives coming up to continue to recruit additional members to support the buildings our littlest bulldogs kindergarten and falls linox had their breakfast buddies last week which is they get to invite a significant male in their life whether it's dad grandpa uncle somebody to come and have a doughnut breakfast and coffee or juice with them and then they get to get walked to their classroom by the

003adult which is always fun um halloween parties and fall parties are on the horizon for next week um our early childhood is they're these guys are busy they've got a trip to the farm township fire station tour virtual story time at the library and a royal princess tea party coming up not to mention tomorrow night is their fall party um opus is doing breakfast buddies in november and they're getting ready for the halloween parties they always provide a craft and put together treat bags for each of the classrooms so they usually put together around 500 treat bags for the kids which is crazy i've been involved in that they also started this this year um they're doing a coffee with the counselor with amanda schmidt who's the the building counselor at opus um so during

004the school morning parents were able to come in and had a meeting with her and she talked about what her role is as the counselor in the building and how she's there to support the students and the parents she has a website that you can log into that you can send a note to her if you feel like your student needs some extra intervention um and then the kids can access things on her website as well high school is getting ready to host a presentation on monday in this room for the haney foundation rick and beth haney started this foundation to raise mental health awareness and support after their son john tragically committed suicide our middle school has a room called john's safe place which is filled with resources and support and just some calming

005things for kids that they can go to when they're feeling overwhelmed there's counselors on hand that can talk with them so that's kind of what's going on with pta any questions that's it thank you thank you so much claire's update dr demarco yes last week was the polaris advisory meeting so they had 300 and somewhat plus members of their business partnerships and community partnerships in for dinner and to see the facilities um and to kind of brainstorm and collaborate on how things will look next year and things they can do going forward some of the things they reported that i thought were interesting that i wanted to share was that this year our the total population of polaris students is 31 from olmsted falls it's up from 26 last year so we have an increase

006of students that are going and we continue to be one of the higher districts that are sending students there some of the other districts definitely have lower numbers they are doing their high school visits and some of their orientation and i guess awareness days the this month and next month so this month the 28th and 29th polaris is coming to homestead falls high school and then they are doing visits at polaris uh november 15th through the 17th and then registration night is november 18th so if anyone is interested in that information and finally i was given a banner for both the high school and then one for the middle school because olmstead falls is a district of distinction for the um project lead the way programs so i left them at home i'll bring them

007back to the school sorry mark sometimes this week or next so that's it are we the smallest district that um brooklyn those numbers it includes the students enrolled in polaris classes that are here and there that's a great question i mean that's my question i can look because they show us lots of numbers i bet you not i don't think it is i think it's their population at the school but i can pull that up and and send it back to you they did have a lot of numbers of students that completed the the satellite programs yes are we unique in having the satellite programs at our school we were originally unique in that i think we were one of the pioneers in that and then others had come along any other questions thank you

008dr chet chapman all right good evening everybody um since we last met um i'm gonna start on a somber note we had one of our employees uh pass away and you know whether they're employee family member you know they're all bulldogs and so the news comes and it's heavy and we had to communicate that out to staff and students and families so i just want to take a moment to recognize kim petrina for um helping us wordsmith those you know sensitive messages and she always has a nice way to find the find the right words to say and share with uh staff and then also along with that dr shannon goss she helped organize we're part of a multi-district crisis support grief support counseling team so she helped mobilize that so when staff came in

009on monday they had support services if they wanted to have someone to talk with or you know just have some time away from their regular assignment in order to have that so um so that's tough um you know staff are doing better but um you know that was unexpected and and so i just want to recognize those two for their help with that uh also at the last board meeting we talked about the last friday night football game the last home football game and how there was going to be some extra supervision so last friday was that game and um you know it was a nice victory over avon lake so that was great but also i just want to thank kelly for organizing the principles and the principles for being there helping have that

010extra support again kim helped us with some messaging for the buildings leading up to that friday night just reminding students of the expectations you know no no balls no bags no toys you're supposed to be there to watch and participate you know watching the game not so much uh playing in the grass you know with your friends and so the students really responded well um you know those announcements during the school day leading up to and then the admin being there and the extra staff being there really helped i think it was a great positive experience for everyone from the students the parents to general community members it was a it was a good experience and we're hopeful that we're going to have another home playoff game or two this season so i will keep

011that rolling and then speaking of the stadium heath has been leading the work on the turf project so we have the 321 community group who has raised donations who has raided service and kind in order to convert us from a grass field to a turf field and originally the plan was to start in this past summer and because of some production from the turf company related to things of covid the project got delayed and then the original then so then the plan became well as soon as the football season is over we're going to start working on that project if you remember this summer and the amount of moisture and rain we had it affected us so our soil is pretty wet right now but it also affected those services those people who are going

012to donate services in kind they got delayed in their projects and so when we met uh two weeks ago you know they were saying you know we're really kind of backed up now ourselves and so in order for us to you know really be able to give it all that we we want to offer um now is probably not the best time so we met again today um and we reviewed you know the project everything is is set as far as uh you know the projects on time we have the funds all from private donations and we're just looking at the timing we want the timing to be right to have the minimal disruption to our students our athletes and our uh on our band um you know so there's this this tight window in

013the summer after commencement because we're planning to have commencement at the stadium again um that gives us eight weeks until august 1st and so then there's a little bit of buffer before our first game which is the first week of september um so that's on track and that's good heath has been doing a lot of great work with that coordinating with different um suppliers and vendors and it's going to be it's going to be a nice project coming up uh additionally so then the next is new hires so um you know in food service we have a preparer that we are hiring we have a new uh food server that we're hiring sam chin our food service director he provided us the numbers as far as the amount of meals that he's providing this year

014compared to past years and also the profit from those sales and it's really justified that his staff does need more staffing there so we're creating a new position in the food service for for a server and then also recently we posted for a paraprofessional so uh yvonne frigg has been a paraprofessional for us for i want to say 15 years and she is retiring so she's retiring actually at the end of this month we knew about that the board approved that uh a year ago um so we've posted for her replacement um and we're working on those so still staffing is um you know still out there usually it's by now we're set and we're ready to run with the with this with the school year um but things are what they are and that

015that's okay uh we'll continue to interview and recruit for subbing so subs in all the categories are needed obviously bus drivers is number one cleaners utility workers maintenance uh support staff for students uh you know paraprofessionals classroom aides things like that and then also the certified staff so uh teacher subs and all that so that's that's ongoing that's now a 12-month recruiting activity not just a seasonal and then the last thing i want to talk about is uh vr headsets so i'm sure you guys have seen commercials where you you know put your smartphone in a va vr headset and you know you create this like 3d world so through a grant we were able to obtain uh some vr headsets for instructional purposes and it's going to be in the math department middle school

016and high school kelly will probably share more at some point this meeting or next but really i just want to focus on uh joe magre the director of technology and his staff they came together when those came in they had a program do a little programming and then also have to figure out the storage of it so the company is a relatively new it's a new product and it's a relatively new company so they sent us their you know here's the charging station and you're supposed to hang it on the wall and they're just there for anybody to play with and so of course we had a little concern about accessibility especially outside the class time especially being in middle school and high school environment so joe was working with his staff to develop a

017fixed lock storage container and we have some of these um chromebook carts that we since students are one-to-one we now have all the we have a handful of carts that are not being used so he was in the process of converting those he actually shared it back with the vendor and they said hey that's pretty cool like that's that's pretty nice so it provides flexibility as well because it's in a cart not on a wall it can go different classrooms or whatnot so um so that'll be pretty neat i think kelly has uh pd scheduled for staff and how to use those and instructional purposes and things like that so so that's good for them any questions about what i shared or what's in the written report all right thanks thanks assistant superintendent good evening

018everyone uh just to let you know that we do have scheduled for all of your entertainment the opportunity for you to engage in the vr headsets in december so at our december meeting we will have some students and the teachers come and you will have an opportunity to go through one of the modules for the algebra one just to see what they're experiencing in their classroom so as dr tapman mentioned the staff will be trained the prisms instructor professional development person is flying in and will be here on november 2nd in training the algebra 1 staff from the middle school in high school and we have a handful of students from our geometry class at that our eighth graders will be coming in on that day for the last hour so the teachers can actually

019see students using them and in the system the first time before they put it out with all of their students so i asked mr odin if he could find a few of those students who had already done algebra one so they weren't going to get caught up in the not knowing the content and he said he had like 25 volunteers and i said i only need like six so uh he's trying to figure out so when you mention something like that you have student engagement before they've even done anything with it so i'm excited to see it and excited for you to see it as well so real quick on i will send you this all electronically as well i know sometimes at a board meeting it's hard when it's in an email and you're

020trying to look at it but i just wanted to share with you and i think i've mentioned this before in regards to the work we've been doing over the last six years with student engagement and the design qualities and working towards inspiring and empowering our students on a daily basis so in year six we have decided to well actually we started it pre-pandemic and then the pandemic hit and we weren't able to kind of complete the process but we are engaging in a protocol that is from the schlectty center called walking to learn and walking to learn is where you have a group of educators teachers who go into a building that is not their own and they they do a learning walk where it is non-judgmental teachers invite us into their classroom and we

021have an opportunity to speak to students about the work that they're doing in the classroom we have on the second page you'll see the walking to learn protocol which has sample questions so we go into these classrooms and we walk around and we ask students talk to me about the work you're doing right now um when you get schoolwork that is um engaging or exciting why do you want to keep doing it what are the things that you are how is it that you learn best so we ask student these questions and we write down their answers and we observe student work from the hallways that's hanging up things that they're doing in the classroom once the team is trained in the protocol and we do the learning walk in the building we then come

022back together the team who's visited and we sit in a room and we write what's called an affirmation letter so if you turn to the next um staple packet that says march 4th of 2020 and it's not it's not the wrong date this was if you remember we so we visited falls lenox for our first round of this protocol um on march 4th of 2020 and then march 15th school was cancelled for just two weeks and then it wasn't just two weeks so we never had a chance to actually go and present our affirmation letter to the falls lenox staff because of the fact that they just weren't in session anymore and it didn't it didn't feel like the right time to do this so we just a couple weeks ago were able to bring

023anissa roland in from the shelecte center and we actually had an opportunity to finally sit down with the falls lineups building design team to share our affirmation letter when you read through the affirmation letter and like i said this is non-judgmental it's about us learning about what is going on in the district as it relates to engagement and the design qualities so when you look at the falls one what i wanted to kind of point out is you'll see that there's things that we learned and when i say we learn it's the team who does the learning walk it's what we learned by being in your building and you then underneath it have what were the things that students said or the stuff that you observed the things that you observed and you put it

024as your evidence within the affirmation letter so you'll see each block block is kind of a we learned and then here's why this is the evidence to support our learning and then when you go towards the very last page you'll say you'll see at the very end where the team says that these learnings so what we've seen in the building have caused us to want to learn more about the following and there are things that what we saw and what we thought we might see but maybe we didn't see or what we thought we were we wouldn't see but we did see and um the one thing we talked about with lisa's building design team with miss williams was what does board really mean we heard students say a lot i don't like when i'm

025bored i don't like work that's boring right remember that these are first through third graders so we talked about do we need to give them other language for board right so is the work too challenging so then if it's challenging it's bored is it that i wish i could be doing something else with this work with this content in a different way um because that's boring to me so we really talked about do we begin to give them that language so that they don't say that they're bored and we talked about how that becomes self-advocacy many students aren't going to go up to a teacher and say i really wish you would give me something different than this because i really didn't like this activity that you right they're not going to do that so

026we talked about though how could we model that for students how could we have dialogue with students so that they become comfortable being able to advocate for themselves with their learning and then we talked about the idea that with the board and the advocacy and it was interesting because the students are aware of things that excite them and engage them they don't they might not use the word engage but they'll say i was excited to do this work and as you read through some of the um statements that they made you see them using the design qualities without actually knowing what the we've never sat down and taught the students the 10 design qualities but you'll hear them say i like when i get choice i like when i get to share my work with

027my mom or dad which is affirmation so you begin to see that they might not know the design qualities but they see them in their work and they're able to articulate when those design qualities are used that they're more engaged um so on the last page you'll see we then debrief with the affirmation letter with the the building's design team and then the building design team talks to us about their takeaways from the affirmation letter so what is it maybe that they want to focus on moving forward and it was good because one of the things that they said is false linux has been working very hard on designing engaging work they have done a lot of the heavy lifting they have redesigned many of their lessons the question though from them was do the

028parents even know what questions to ask to find out more about what occurs in school so we all know that when the kids get off the bus apparently how was your day and they go great fine good but what if we as the adults in the classroom miss williams as the principal were able to weekly email out to parents and say if you ask these three or four questions you're going to get more information about their level of engagement because sometimes students just don't give all that information unless the parents ask a specific question but the parents don't know the specific question to ask so that's something that they're going to be working on in their weekly communication with parents from the principal and from the teachers so it was just a really great experience

029so we finished with falls on that day and then in the afternoon we went and did our learning walk our walking to learn with um ecc so we have are in the process of writing their affirmation letter and on november 6th i think or fourth we then go to the ecc and we will share our affirmation letter and they will create their takeaways that afternoon another team is so these are always different teams and they're from high school it's great to have a high school staff in the in the kindergarten building right um so it's great for them to see other buildings within the district so we did ecc next time we'll in the afternoon go to office then we'll go back to them a few weeks later we'll go to the middle school and

030then we'll go to them a few weeks later and then we go to the high school so every building will have one of these um walking to learn protocols so it's it's great it's exciting to see and you know you think about kindergarten i'm writing that one now and you have to write what the students say it really just warms your heart um because you know they just say it like it is um and it's just great to to hear that and uh i think it's great for the teachers as well it affirms what they're doing and allows them to see what's the next level of work so what we did this year is we used um great question we used so every building has a building design team and then i have a district

031design team so we put that out to all building design team members and all district design team members and there's about five to eight of us that will go to a site because if everybody signs up for one and we said just don't sign up for your own building so this time we felt like using the design team members but the protocol says that you you don't have to have any specific qualification in order to do this what would be great is if this protocol becomes something that we use on a regular basis when staff need affirmation and feedback about what how the what the work is is in their building and how they might move forward with that very very fun i've often said to myself if uh if the school just tells me

032as a parent like tell me what the language is and then i'll model it at home and then we're all on the same page hopefully that will occur like you said um something like that outstanding any one of us who has been at a galactic uh board conference he always walks away feeling really good and this is great work any other questions from the board for mrs cogan thank you so much uh rock on keep going um mr robson treasure report uh just a few quick things i'd like to cover here uh on the financial side uh if we look at business through the month of september our total revenue is is off plan by 526 000 the reason is our reimbursements on property taxes your homestead and rollbacks had typically come in september this

033year it came the first week of october so it's going to show up there and that was about a a 1.4 million dollar check to the general fund there so we'll catch up with that next month our expenses um through september uh are down 479 thousand dollars i think that's just a continuation of the cost reduction measures that were put in place our ending cash balance was 395 000 then above plan but if we look at where we ended the month of september this year versus last year our ending cash balance was 13.4 million compared to 5.3 million in the prior year so real pleased with our continued progression on the on the financial front bond refunding on kind of a disappointing note you know we had a nice presentation we had the ball rolling

034our one concern was interest rates and rates went up and we felt after multiple conversations they have gone up to the point where it just made it not feasible at this time so we put the brakes on the work that we've done to date is not lost work it's all stuff that needs to be done regardless depending on how long this goes out uh you know we may be able to use the resolutions that we've already passed if it uh carries on much further you know we'll just simply adopt new resolutions and go on from there but bob was bob was really depressed i think about france when we talked with him but uh i give him credit you know he he could have had a sale he could have had commission but he said

035this is not in our best interest and he recommended us to stop so we'll keep an eye on that you know we talk uh you know we plan on talking every two weeks just to get an update on where things are going and we'll see how that plays out finance committee we met tuesday night and we had a guest presenter with brian dunn who's the administrator of the cuyahoga county budget commission brian gave us a nice overview on the real estate process real estate tax process the triennial updates his his news for us his values and our our community are up 14 and those will be reflected on the uh the next tax bill that goes out i believe the residents should have received a letter from from the county auditor's office explaining or detailing

036maybe what their value is and what they expect it to be uh and then two what's your what your rights are in the process if you would like to appeal those values how you go about doing that so if you've got that letter take a good hard look at it uh and take whatever actions or steps you feel uh are necessary for your side there um currently we're we're fully submerged in the gap conversion we need to have that wrapped up i think by the 15th of november which we will uh but we're also working with the auditors um and then the medicaid agreed upon procedures so it's a very busy time for us and i'm looking for that time where it's not i think anymore i feel like we just finished the audit not

037too long ago and now we're full going to this next one around five year forecast uh chris moore and i have been working on that quite a bit this is going to be a little bit different quite a bit different than prior years because of the significant change to the state funding formula and that's really our final piece we've got a meeting set up i believe for either november 2nd or november 3rd just to hit that one last time and then have that draft ready for you for a pres draft presentation at the work session in november and then we'll come back at our regular meeting for uh for the approval of the final form i you know we had talked a while back about do we continue to use k-12 do we continue to

038use forecast five and with all the changes that are out there i elected to continue with chris uh and his group there and it's it's been a blessing you know chris is he's down there in the columbus area he's got his fingers on the pulse on what they're doing with the state funding formula as best as anybody i think in the state does and he does a great job in sharing that information with us he's been very good to work with and updating our our projections and i think trying to keep them as realistic as possible the curve that was thrown at us though was was ode uh originally was going to have the settlement sheets for the new formula in place for us uh mid-october and we were notified recently that it'll be december

039now before they get those out there the ironic thing is we still need to project or submit our projections our five year forecast in november so we're projecting to them what they're not able to project to us i guess they can't tell us yet what we're gonna get and how that's all gonna work out in the settlement sheet but we're gonna tell them you know what we think that number is so we're going to do the best we can with the information we have on the funding formula and if after you know we submit it november we get those settlement sheets the new settlement sheets in december if there's any changes if we're way off you know we'll make those adjustments have the board re-approve it and submit a corrected or amended version down to

040uh down to columbus but yeah a bit comical i thought quick shout out to dr tapman and uh tim wufu they created this process um from a payroll on the payroll side for i guess in a big step towards eliminating paper timesheets and and you know the the multiple times data is entered into what we're finding out not only our system but all also on the transportation side when they're tracking trips and uh and so on and when you're you're entering information three or four different times by two or three different people you just increase your uh your opportunity for air with this uh automation of that system which includes a greatly enhanced reconcilement opportunity for us i think schar was that was the happiest i saw shar kante the day payroll was due in

041the what eight or nine months that i've been here so if you can make char happy uh we're doing real good but this is that you know this is a relationship and this is the team effort that that you have here at homestead it's just refreshing uh it's nice to see people work together that was i don't want to say unsolicited but you know you and tim came to us with the thought and the concept and you know here's what we think we can help you out with and it's wonderful so we appreciate that very much osba capital conference is the final comment i have i sent out late this afternoon probably about five o'clock emails to you that included your badge your attendees badge and then your individual confirmation for lodge down there at

042the conference so you want to print those out bring them with you i'll have i'll have it set there with me too just in case somebody forgets we'll get you in all right but i want you to have that in case you get there to check in before i do and you'll be able to continue on i think that sunday evening the first general session i think it starts at 4 30 if i'm not mistaken that's what i'm looking forward to they have bart bart connor and uh nadia kominici are the are the guest speakers that might be kind of neat you know if you're a product of the early 70s maybe that might be good so any questions thank you very much dr lloyd thanks um i have a few uh things to report

043on some of which i think uh the audience and the reasons why they're here may uh want to hear about as well so i'm going to talk to the board a little bit about first covid and covid numbers and then secondly i'm going to talk about true accountability my i know that maybe not everybody wants to hear about accountability but i want to provide you with an update on some things so um first as it relates to uh uh to covet and cut here's some some thoughts the numbers that we have at school are considerably lower than what they were at the start of the school year they're considerably lower than the numbers that exist in the 4413 area code and the reason for that is not everybody wears masks in their homes i certainly

044don't do that and the primary way in which covett has been spread is uh in the outside of the school and inside the school much to some people's uh dismay i guess we wear facial coverings in there during the time that they were in session so what's happened is our case counts have been low because of that requirement our exclusions and the way that it works is the exclusions are sometimes more than the number of quarantines because the school cannot quarantine only the department of health can quarantine schools cannot do that so based on the rules that are there we exclude when a quarantine has been issued by the cuyahoga county board of health under the revised code they're allowed to do that we're required by the revised code required not optional required by the

045board of once that happens then we're required to exclude whether we agree with the reasons for that uh quarantining uh or not and i will tell you that i don't agree with all of the reasons why they happen to uh to quarantine kids our exclusions are the result of positive cases that have occurred outside um and i think it's it's evident by the fact that the numbers within our community have gone up um i'm looked recently and some of them are are going down um and so that's that um some of the things that uh that i wanted to talk about as well as it relates to uh some of the things that i've seen that have been brought to my attention are concerning which i think is probably part of the reason why some

046of you are here i've been a school involved in public education for 26 years i've been a school administrator for 23 of those 26 years and i'm very well aware of how the sunshine law works and i respect the sunshine law because i don't think that the business of the school district or the business of the board of education should be done through a cell phone behind closed doors or anything like that and so i just want to start off with uh with that so if those of you in the audience have those concerns i have those same concerns as well and i can assure you that as a superintendent of the school district i would not uh allow that to happen i think that with the massive public request uh public records request that

047his uh that matt made matt's at the broncos game brown's the broncos game tonight is not here um i've indicated the same kind of information to him because he's uh i think put some information out there and there are others in this audience who've taken some of that information and have tried to extrapolate different arguments and put a degree of doubt uh into maybe what the public might think as it relates to whether the board has conducted its business above board or whether or not the superintendent um has also followed suit with that so i'll start just with a quick uh it's a story of just a a set of events and i'm saying this because no one including those of you in the audience have picked up the phone and and uh called me

048to ask things people are making accusations on facebook rather than coming to a meeting or picking up the phone to ask the questions and i would say that i think compared to most superintendents around i'm a guy that likes to talk to people and if people want to pick up the phone and they want to ask questions i certainly have no problem doing that you can ask questions to the board in a public meeting the board does not engage in that back and forth kind of conversation but me as a superintendent and the steward of the board and the head person who's supposed to implement the policies of the board and be responsible for the administration of the business of the school district it's my responsibility to respond to you whenever you call me and

049i certainly talk to lots of people who don't agree with the decisions i make even people who don't like me and that's fine or like the decisions that i make so based on the metrics prior to school starting the district did not start the school year with a mass policy as everybody uh knows and you can take a look at the the plans that we submitted to the department of education there's a requirement that we had to do that i thought that the requirement was just paperwork i thought it was silly but we have a paper trail of those plans that started in july and then went through august and prior to the start of school masking was optional and it was optional because the metrics that i looked at at the time of when

050those decisions were being made were very low i was had concerns as a superintendent that those metrics were continuing to creep up and it's a set of them it's like it's you know there's a set of different numbers that i look at to help me make that decision unfortunately i have to make that decision i don't think that it should be my job to make that decision i think that there are people with a lot bigger desk and make a lot more money um should be making those decisions but for whatever reason uh they've decided to not make those decisions um and they make other decisions i guess that i think they should make but you know they're they're in his uh kind of how things work so my goal um has always been to

051keep as many students and staff in school as possible um even if their parents wish to put them and others at risk and i recognize personal liberty and responsibility and everything else but there are times when people will say i think that my kids should go to school today why did you call school day and i would say call the school a snow day i should say because i think that it puts people at risk you may disagree with that but the law provides that to me and again me that responsibility and that authority i don't think that i should necessarily have that and i'd appreciate if you'd listen because you're going to get the opportunity to speak but i appreciate if you would you would listen some people don't think masks work i happen

052to think that they do i would say that it doesn't matter whether or not i think masses work or not what i do know is that when students wear mass in school according to the cuyahoga county board of health they are allowed to stay in school i disagree with a lot of what the cuyahoga county board of health says i disagree with their quarantine guidelines that they have put out i can tell you and you probably know this as well that those quarantine guidelines have changed in lorain county in summit county in medina county in lake county but they have not changed in cuyahoga county and kyle county has indicated the superintendents the only time that they will change is if the ohio department of health makes that change now i'm praying that the ohio

053department health will institute some flexibility and maybe look towards other kinds of things because one of the problems with the current uh quarantine policy is it's requiring kids us because we have to follow that by the revised code to keep kids at home if they've been quarantined and yes there are well kids not sick kids well kids being kept home uh in quarantine and i think that's wrong i don't think that that should be uh should be done but regardless those county differences are there and that certainly is um is maddening prior to that policy being implemented and it was implemented in september the school board discussed masking in open session at a regular board meeting on august 18th it was on a public agenda and the school board also discussed critical race theory uh

054in open session as well that was also on the agenda i don't believe that there was many audience members during that particular time but it was there and those agendas are public and when we discussed that it was really to talk about the mass policy and the mass policy is like 8506.1 or some something like that but number 9c within that policy says it is such times during times of elevated communicable disease and spread the superintendent may activate this policy by notifying the school community requiring all staff volunteers and others to wear appropriate face coverings masking whatever now i will tell you personally i hate wearing a mask i've had covet i've been vaccinated for covid and i think the probability of me getting covered is i probably could win the lottery more than than

055me getting covered as far as that probability goes but nevertheless the masking policy is in place and it's in place not because whether or not we agree on whether or not mass worker don't work but they do help keep kids and staff in school and that's one of the bottom lines for me is to keep our schools open and keep them until those things happen to uh to change so did that mean i reviewed with the board in open session the logic that i would use that would trigger me to enacting the mass policy that the board voted for on march 18th i mean we reviewed that in open session and i think that the board had a pretty clear understanding of what that is and that was um that was done prior to the

056masking policy being put into place so then what happened is the numbers started to change at the start of school we went into school we were four days into school and what we saw was cova cases being brought in we saw a number of students being excluded and a number of students being quarantined and my colleague from wadsworth andy hill had 500 kids who had to be quarantined and at that particular point in time i became concerned of our own numbers but also what it was looking like overall and at that point i instituted the board policy because the metrics that i used to make those decisions reached a level that concerned me and based on that policy that you approved in march of 2021 it triggered me to uh to institute uh that policy

057so it wasn't instituted without debate because there was debate there may not have been a debate with the public about that but as a superintendent i have a duty to implement the policies of the board when those kinds of things are are evident to me and at that particular point they were prior to instituting that particular policy and this is i think it's the sunshine part where people are concerned about i sent a text message to board members and indicated to them that i'm going to be instituting the mass policy i also sent an email to staff members because prior to policies going into place um that we announced to the public as a professional courtesy i first need to let the five people who hire me let them know what it is that i'm

058going to do and i also let the those that i guess technically work for me or that i consider colleagues know uh what it is that uh that i'm gonna do i don't always use text messages but i use text messages in order to get important information to the board that i see is like really immediate and important examples of that might include um we are sending the dogs through the high school in order to do just like a drug uh sweep we're conducting a um a safety drill that is going to be a lockdown safety drill or the water isn't turned on at the ecc or the electricity is out somewhere else those points that i send out via text are meant to be informational pieces overall my text to the school board was

059that now during that time when i after i sent that i didn't say i am implementing the mass policy do i have your permission do i have your blessing do you care whether or not i implement the mass policy or not i didn't need to do that and i didn't need to do that because on march 18th 2021 you put a mass policy in place that said that at times of elevated communicable disease um in community spread the superintendent has the authority to implement the mass policy um there are times when uh the board agrees 100 percent on everything and there are times when the board doesn't agree 100 on everything things between yourselves and things that i do and i think that that's fine that's just the nature of the business of how to

060do things so responses based on that were sent to me unsolicited i don't want to say unwanted but unsolicited of um some were support and some were not um but they were unsolicited and in my opinion and with all due respect they were irrelevant um uh to me so um i guess uh then within that i think is uh that was in an email um at that particular time uh when i there was an email that i said that i do not want any my decisions impacting the election results um and that's taken on a life of its own in some ways as well thinking that i'm somehow interested in electing uh in influence in the electing results and we may disagree on this because i think there are probably some that may think that

061i've tried to do that on occasion but whether the election results are technically in my favor or not in my favor it doesn't matter i don't is the person who runs the school district want to impl i want to intervene in any way or have anything that i do impact those election results so i was very clear that said this is not a vote of the board of education of whether or not the mass policy has been going to be implemented because you've given me that statutory authority to implement that mass policy i did it now recognizing that you're the persons that gave me that authority that may very well impact things but good bad or otherwise there are lots of things that may occur that that i don't want to influence anything whether any

062kind of candidate is for me or against me and i recognize that there are a group of people that don't necessarily like the things that i do which i think is fine because that's how it is in the reality of of life but when people start to make accusations that somehow there's back board business or we're meeting somewhere else or we're doing things that are that are not above board i have a problem with that because when government does that that's bad government and and i don't believe that should be done anywhere in the united states and i certainly do not want to be part of any of that here and so one of the reasons why i wanted to bring this up is because it has nobody has called me nobody has asked me

063these questions and there's been a heck of a lot of uh of information out there and people making up a false narrative about things and we live in a time when sometimes that starts to run or starts to run away from itself and it's important to me whether or not we like each other whether or not we agree with one another is irrelevant what we do is we care about olmsted fall city schools and there isn't a person here that doesn't do that i think in this room and wants to do right by students we may disagree on how we get there but the end result is that we want to do that so in the interest of the board in the interest of the audience i wanted to share that information with you at

064least to let you know what my thought is and how i think about those things does the board have any questions about anything that i've just said okay yeah absolutely so the next thing that i wanted okay on behalf of the board i think that we do appreciate um you addressing any false narratives out there that the board is not conducting itself within the proper guidelines of our rules for governed by rules and so we appreciate you well i thank you for saying that i mean i'm not the only person that has that duty as well uh the treasurer has that duty um too and and i honestly i take that duty um seriously so the next thing yes the next thing i want to talk about and um and i'll be honest i mean

065it's a game night and i'm a season ticket holder and i'm not at the game tonight so i i'm not don't want to like make things go fast but i do want to make i do want to make things be efficient um i do want to talk to you about quickly kind of what we're learning from john tanner about true accountability and i want to try to just quickly walk through that which way exercise that i sent to you as well because it's something that we did as professionals and i think it's something that's uh advantageous for you so at the last session that we had with john uh which was yesterday um we talked about a couple different things um first we we talked about the word rigor because the word rigor uh is

066used an awful lot and in education we believe in that the problem is and this is an interesting thing that john had us do was conduct an investigation of the word rigor so when you do that and you look at that word and what it looks like within the context of society it has generally a negative connotation when you look it up i mean it refers to rigor mortis it refers to unhealingly harsh austerity strictness other kinds of things as a negative connotation yet when you look in the educational literature it has things like growth mindset challenging useful effort things that are good for students so i think when we communicate with our constituents and our stakeholders we need to be mindful that sometimes the words that we use have a negative connotation so john

067kind of put forth and said maybe the word vigor ought to be used rather than rigor because it seems maybe that there's some some action to that um we thought that was interesting he mainly focused on this that there are two forms of accountability that exist uh and not just in education but overall in the world and those two forms um really fall into two categories and one is called protectionist accountability and the other is called an institutional accountability and it's not that a protectionist accountability is bad because it needs to be there some people who work in certain organizations may not like protectionist accountability but it's there types of protectionist accountabilities include things like the clean air act right if if you're you know if you're working uh um in industry sometimes and you're

068you know you know that the clean air act if uh you're gonna get shut down it's gonna it's gonna shut down your production and you know your profits are gonna um are gonna be low and people argue both for and against different aspects of the clean air act but overall people think like okay clean air that seems like a good idea right we want clean air how we get there may be a little bit different protectionist accountabilities include things like driver's licenses professional certificates and licensure for doctors i mean we want a doctor who's at least passed right and has his license and and attorneys and everything else and so when you get those they don't really report like you know maybe some of you know that whether you got a 90 or 100 on

069your driver's test but that's not on your license they give you a license because you've passed the driver's test right that's a yes or no so protectionist accountabilities are yes or no things associated with them is that they're top down they're compliance driven they're authority-based they could be turned off you could say okay we're not going to do that protectionist accountability you can like pollute the air all you want you know we don't want to do those things but they do that um so that's what a protectionist accountability is conversely there is another accountability system and that's called an institutional accountability system and i would say and john would say this the protectionist accountability systems are not meant to make organizations great they are meant to have organizations comply so places you know that do

070things with um that potentially could pollute the air that's not going to help them be a great organization that's just something that they need to say yes we do that and then our business model is going to do this in order to help our organization great he brought up the uh an example of like um uh you could think of like smart water or dancing or some sort of water company they're not going to say hey guess what we passed the clean or the clean water act you know that's not something for them that they're going to that's not going to make their organization great they're going to look to other things they're going to try to make their organizations great so protectionist accountability is necessary not bad but they don't help organizations become great

071institutional accountabilities make their organizations or are interested in the area idea of greatness and there are four of those there's personal um institutional accountability and that is um me what i do every day um my internal and want to um be make myself better and be excellent right so i wake up every day and i want to try to be maybe some disagree a better superintendent than i was the day before at least in the long term overall um there's internal accountabilities within my organization that my boss does things um and and has the accountability or i have the accountability of my boss in order to help make me a good employee because if i'm a good employee and i'm doing the things that i want to do i'm not going to lose my job

072and i'm going to help make my organization great generally people who go to work they want to try to add value to their organization right and that's an internal kind of accountability or internal institutional accountability the third one is called a professional institutional accountability and that is that my peers decide how well i do all right so if you're in a group or you're on a team and you're on an i.t team the contribution that you can make to developing software my son's a software developer the more value that you add to your team there's pure that peer or professional accountability and i'm doing what i can in order to make my organization great and add greatness to what it is that we do and then the final one and this is the one i

073think that really focuses on us is called institutional organizational accountability and this is going to be the focus for us because our primary stakeholders determine how well we do this accountability and our primary stakeholders are not sitting around this table our one of our primary stakeholders but not the most primary are out there in the audience and they are our community um they are our parents but ultimately your primary stakeholders are the stakeholders that if they did not exist you would not exist so if you think about that our primary stakeholders are students now you could say okay well if there are parents then there aren't students and and so what complicates or not complicates what makes a challenge or an interesting kind of dichotomy is within a school district organization is we need to

074make certain that we pay attention to first and foremost our primary stakeholders which are students and parents and our community so if we do that and we engage them in language of how and what are your hopes and dreams of what you want from your school district once we clear this covet hurdle and get past all this other nonsense hopefully we can get back to trying to make things an organization of greatness and we're going to do that when we're in the middle of all this stuff which i will tell you is a challenge but we're going to do it nevertheless because we owe it to our students and our families um not doing well in this kind of organizational institutional accountability will impact the survivability of the organization if we do not continue to

075try to make ourselves a better organization and we rely only on kind of those sorts of perfectionists or protectionists or compliance kinds of things people are going to go i'm going to move somewhere else i'm going to go to another school district that is really interested in those kinds of things the interesting part about all of this if you take a look at the kind of accountability that's in education and you think of like where is that the kind of accountability in education is defined as a protectionist accountability the purpose of it is to hold one's feet to the fire to be compliant it's not meant to make an organization great and the problem within that is um those who are the policymakers who i do believe the policymakers are our elected officials and our

076governor and our legislator i think that their hearts in the right place but what they've taken is the wrong kind of accountability and they're using the wrong kind of metric and what's the metric that they use in order to determine compliance they use state test scores that are arbitrarily set and they think that by putting that in place that kind of accountability is going to create greatness and therein is the problem that it does not make greatness because whether somebody is compliant with that or not compliant with that doesn't determine whether or not they're a great organization now the public and others will look at that and go well yeah it does because they do better than you the problem with that is they do better than you and that doing better may be based

077on certain factors that are outside of the control of the organization itself which is um you know the school the school organization and what the community makeup is so rather than looking at that kind of protectionist internal accountability and we'll certainly live in that world and we'll play that game because we have to we ought to want to do better for our primary stakeholders which again are our students and parents and we're going to continue to learn more about and study how we can become an excellent organization within the context of institutional accountability under the idea of making our organization great by engaging our primary stakeholders and asking them the question of what benefits do you expect your organization that you're part of and you want to have a relationship with ie the school district

078to provide to you and when you ask that question and this is gets to the exercise generally people don't say higher test scores they don't say that so what i did for you is i asked you because we did this exercise with john is he said it's the which way exercise and the which way exercise and i have some x-rays and i will pass them out just so you guys can see him i don't have enough i wasn't exactly sure the question that was asked um i don't know if you guys have uh have that if you call it up and we're not going to go through all of it because it takes a while to do but the question that was posed to us was john said this he said from your perspective please

079provide five reasons why we educate children um and you know we have this sheet right here and on the bottom he said there's two things that i want you to write down there too i want you to write state test scores and i want you to write graduation rates and so i i filled in the blank for the first one and i was going to show you the answers that i put out there and i would just ask the board what are some of the answers that you had and you're not going to call each one of you and you have put you on the spot but what were some of the things that you said just i mean you know you can make it give me an answer and maybe if your other colleagues

080say that i see that people have papers filled out so why don't you give me one linda go ahead oh [Music] make informed decisions right so if your kids graduate that seems like a good idea right like god make them do that and get them off the payroll i mean brett and i had a conversation today and i have three kids one who's off the payroll not the payroll right means that they are self-sufficient i don't pay their cell phone i don't pay their car insurance none of that they're off the payroll if that happens they get off the payroll and that's what we want we want them to get off the payroll what about you uh phil i see you have your uh on your phone uh prepare kids to realize their full potential

081full potential right okay if they realize their full potential that certainly is a value that can be added to them the down and you know that's i won't i won't skip to the next com who else had had one to add value to society as adults to make a difference to add value to society as a dog got i mean we have a raise a child that is actually going to make a contribution in some way shape or form that seems like it would be a pretty good thing dr demarco what did you have anything cool she took yours right she did she took mine dang it i also thought it was important that we educate kids so that we are sharing knowledge and information and translating that information into okay so they're going to

082learn things that they're actually going to use okay anybody else want to say anything sure okay why not go around the horn um i put that we educate uh to develop socially uh well-being like to have somebody who has this self-actualization that maybe um right the whole child in a sense is kind of what you were going for i'm not going to ask you brett you know because i don't think i sent it to you so we did that and then we did that for five different things now five you know you can probably think of more than five different things and i would imagine those of you in the audience probably have some of those or something like that the next question was is the reason easy or difficult to measure or observe man

083that's tough that's the thing you think like what like all those like that is like gooey and like ambiguous and amorphous like how you gonna do that right so then think of like is this reason included in the state system the state accountability system some of those things you said so for me it was that's difficult and a big no on that and then the last one is the reason oriented towards the future of the past so is it forward-looking reports on what might be ahead or is it backward-looking of what had already been they're forward-looking i was there's a dad who had three kids go through the school district who happens to be the superintendent and all three of my kids graduated from here got you know i certainly am it's not that you're

084disinterested in some of those things that are backward viewing but man i'm looking forward life is more about olmstead falls high school it we prepare for what's next whatever that what's next might happen to be so we went down and we did all of these and and each building team came up with uh with five and they went back and they then had to create a system to try to begin to think about how they're gonna they're gonna um we use the word measure and the word measurement and my background is in assessment um you know that used to be my forte and i can certainly go through test scores with the best of them and do all those different things that's what i what i did but um it needs to be more than

085quantitative information not everything can be quantified some things can but not everything can be quali you know some people say well you know not not everything can be counted and not all things that count can be you know i forget exactly what the phrase is but it's something like that like not all things count but some things can be counted um anyway there are some things that rather than you can quantify you gather evidence right phil you're an attorney right i mean you quantify things sometimes do you gather evidence like do we send people to prison based on data really i mean you may have like you know i watch dexter and blood splatter analysis and all those other different kinds of things and i know they do that and that's a data point you

086send people you're you're an attorney and if you happen to practice that kind of law people go to prison people people have the death penalty based on data that based on evidence and so one of the things i think that we need to do that we will learn is the best way in which to engage in this process is first that the benefits we may have our ideas of what the benefits are and it's not that they don't matter because they are important but what matters most is what benefits our primary stakeholders are looking for from this school district and the benefits i'm sorry the primary stakeholders are students and parents i believe that those things will certainly align but what happens in order to get to where we need to go in this promised

087land of organizational institutional accountability is significant family student and community engagement on what are the benefits that our public who moves here and pays the high taxes that they do and i know because i pay him as well what benefits do they expect and do they want um they're moving here people complain about the taxes but i'm telling you people you you see the homes that sell in the developments and you i'm like oh my god they actually paid that for that home they're moving in because they see value in what it is that we provide i see value in what it is that we provide but we're going to be able to tell a better story i think a more robust story that's not going to be just quantitative information because we'll quantify but

088it will be qualified information as well and we will gather evidence to tell our story and we will do that through engaging our community uh to do that so our learning and this is only session two we have about 22 more sessions ahead we meet um every month and then within that period of time we break off and the buildings have 30 minutes a day a week that they spend talking about these kinds of concepts and so they have homework that they're going to follow up on uh each and every time so when i complain and i do on social media about things and people beat me up and say you're just making excuses for the teachers unions and others believe me i'm not going to make an excuse for a teacher's union i'm not

089going to do that but what i am going to do is i'm going to say that i think that we have or we can find a better way in which to tell our story to hold ourselves more accountable to the community because we're not going to make up how we're going to hold up our accountability we're going to ask the community and bring them in to that conversation and that's what we're going to be held accountable to what's cool about this is that this is not the first school district that john has been with for those of you that know john tanner he's done this in multiple states he's doing this nationally and we just happen to be one of the school districts that are um i guess that one of the founding members of

090the buckeye cohort that's going to happen uh here in in our state so the idea is that we do need to live within both that testing world that's out there and that what i'm going to call 20th century accountability model as we build personally build the 21st century accountability model and then people aren't going to do what it is they're not just going to trust us we need to take that to them and we need to show them what it is that we did and show that there can be a better way to hold schools accountable and to determine what school quality is rather than having to just be based on standardized test scores doesn't mean the test scores don't matter it doesn't mean the test scores don't count because they do what it means

091is that it can't that that small amount of information that we get from kids where really only 20 percent of who they are is really within that is we're relying on on using that as 100 of how we report out on quality and that does a disservice to kids and families and community and quite honestly to education so that's my report any questions from the board thank you thank you everyone for your reports tonight so much exciting things going on in our school district and we appreciate all the administration giving their reports tonight i want to hearing of the public and it looks like you have a few people that like to address the board i remind everyone they have five minutes and i'll start the timer when you uh start so the first person

092is mr ed dean good evening my name is ed dean i live in mapleway and olmsted falls um first of all can you hear me all right yeah okay first of all i want to address my concern number one as far as far as the mass mandates are concerned that suzanne corley two school board meetings ago presented information scientific information and and indications of where you can find that information as far as massing is harmful to our kids i'm hoping that the school board has addressed that and has researched that information only you can answer that secondly about two or three school board meetings ago the board was asked are you familiar with the critical race theory and some members were not yet dr lloyd knew about it as early as 2017. so i'm concerned

093about the communication sharing of pertinent information uh thirdly on as far as the uh i'm here to address the policy manual which is eight uh section eight thousand title protective facial coverings during the pandemic slash epidemic events code number p08450.01 i'm concerned about that uh that memo and incidentally so it'd be understood when everybody when you signed up uh board members to become part of the school board i'm sure you sign verbally pledged to uphold the laws of the state of ohio well i want to i'm here to tell you that you are in violation of state laws on your masking policy okay i have packets of information what i want to make is part of the minutes i want to present to the secretary so that he can give to each of the board

094members specifically employees who are hired by the board are not required by law to have to wear a mask what the district's policies are are merely policies for the district not backed up by law not backed up by law you show me a lot of they are and i'll i'll concur but i have law revised ohio codes would say differently for example ohio revised code 4112 concerns a lot of employment meaning you can't force someone to wear a mask so a teacher an employee does not have to wear a mask if he or she so chooses ohio revised code 4731.34 quote no practices shall be used that may be dangerous or detrimental to life or health that is a long you are ignoring the law number three ohio revised code 4731.41 practicing medicine without license

095or certificate by saying that the board of health or the governor whose mandate ran out on the 13th of october under executive order he no longer can issue those guidelines and and assume it's legal that ran out as far as october 13th is concerned therefore if this board quotes any entity or this board says no the board has decided that everybody wears a mask you are in violation of state law i have instructed on the college level law i know what i'm talking about and i can back it up with evidence so in that with that uh you may want to look at some of the guidelines by the way in that is on the guidelines noted on that date is the legal reference for those guidelines and those got legal reference on the last

096page and those guidelines have no reference to masking yet guidelines they are locker search policy prescribed curriculum diploma or honors diploma or conditions for adopting dress code there's no reference to masking but that was the legal justification by this board so that you should be familiarized with the law as it relates to students be familiarized with how it affects the students to health reasons and i want to give each of you mr dean what was your first one i'm writing them down as far as what you said i should say too there is a pending lawsuit against the school district we're going to let the courts decide that so it's up to judge adam to decide we don't believe so so that's why we'll let the courts do that i understand that what was your

097first one though okay there's a copy of those ordinances can you just tell me what number one was i could just write it down which one you wanted number one you said there were three things first you i missed it and then you said crt and violation along four one two point zero no you said you made three points and your first point was and i missed it did somebody write it down thanks mr dean for letting me know that next up mr ray safari good evening everybody i'm not a really good speaker i will try my best about i'm honest guy i will say what's on my mind thank you this is the document i just gave him it's the blueprint for 2012 soccer field and another attachment is the ladder from northeast ohio

098sewer district about how bad the soccer field is and trespassing the water the bar will come from your soccer field to now to our yard i know you don't care i know you think you're above allah three years i've been having problem with the war i don't hear from one of you guys give me a call or stop by or care because you treat me that's how i feel if you or the trustees back there you treat me like a second class citizen and i mean it that's for first thing just you have the document if you can copy it and give it to everybody please yes the second thing the safety of the school before the school uh start i stopped by i drove by and was madly sticks in the front yard that's

099not by the code i saw them they took it off and they fix it and there's a melee sticks in the ground by the parking lot behind the school district we are behind the office of the school district i don't know if they fix it or not the third one it's about the mask i'm not going to argue the mask is right or wrong everything everybody have his opinion and i think you have bigger problems that my son has been over 10 days is very sick from virus and i want i understand a lot of kids got sick from the virus and everybody wearing a mask i think you have a bigger problem with that maybe you have to look at to clean the school i don't think it's the mask everybody have a mask

100my son came to school is everything is good he's been i never he's 15 years old i never saw him sick like that never ever in my life he missed over 10 days in school he's messed 10 days yes sir and what i understand he's not the only child he's been sick he got the shots from last year and we did the covet test he have no covet and he had the virus and what i understand it's a lot of kids in the school have the the virus and they did the test they don't have covet the smear mask is not working you don't have to agree with me or i agree with you if i have to wear a mask somewhere i will wear it i respect the law but i don't think it's

101work be honest it's like now i walk to the school 6 30 i came in here you have 40 kids outside there nobody have mascara you don't have mascara if allah say you can't smoke at the school you can't go smoke in the school inside the school and tell me you don't smoke in the school it's the same thing to me it's the same thing as the map the mess the mass policies during school operation mr safari who may disagree with all about the time the kids at the school the school operation it's not going to make it different if you give him six hours or you give him 10 hours it's not going to make it different to me i'm not i'm not arguing with you if it's right or wrong i think maybe

102you have to spray to clean the school i don't know and i don't think the mask is working be honest with you i'm not against the mask but i don't think it's working and will i would be appreciate if you look at the document i give uh i'm sorry that's my first meeting here i'm usually at the trustee they like me a lot there thank you everybody thank you [Music] can't i can't just there i'm sorry you said you need tech support no i don't need texas oh mr scott said it you know i'll scan i'll scan the uh the documents that mr zapati provided to each of you okay thank you hi um my name is dr scott selachek and i'm a parent with two kids in the high school uh i lived in

103olmsted township for 17 years i own a local business in olmsted falls i'm a dedicated contributor and volunteer and i care about our amazing community just like everyone else here after seeing a news article explaining how some laws were violated by other local schools when they changed their mass policies abruptly some people that i've talked to wanted to understand what actually happened in our school system with respect to superintendent and school board and the uh changing of the policy so people started asking questions and just for a super quick background in case some people don't know prior to school starting it was communicated to all parents that it would be their choice whether their student wore a mask or not simple so people made their choices everyone accepted the various possibilities that would go with

104those choices when a positive case or exposure happened because we all knew it would however a mass mandate for all students was abruptly put in place about four days into the school year which was uh overriding the individual choices that all the parents made it seemed to be probably over 80 percent i think of parents that chose no mask maybe even 90. but whether one likes the policy change or not that's that's really irrelevant so you got to understand that it's the process okay and it's all too familiar it seems that the superintendent chose to implement the mandate in a unilateral and some people think even possibly in an unlawful way i don't know that remains to be seen since that fourth day of the school year though a growing number of parents and i

105talked to a lot of parents every day been asking for simple communication answers to their questions transparency accountability uh from superintendent and even the school board members that are all here and by the way i actually i very much appreciate what all five of you school board members have done and uh helping the community in all of the ways that you have long before you ever got on the school board and are sitting here today so i very much appreciate the things you've done and continue to do so i do thank you for that but anyway many emails by parents were sent to all of you and even uh to superintendent and too often there was either no response given or the response was condescending disrespectful impulsive dismissive and that was mostly uh by superintendent

106lloyd i even received an email like that myself would you send me those scott and those in for that information that you just said sure thanks yeah so i also found out just today that um a invitation for me to participate in a wellness fair that i've done annually was rescinded so that's interesting but there is an example of a letter right here that i brought from a parent and i don't have time to read it but it's simple questions and no answers so but it's now known that the lack of responses to letters like this was in part because the superintendent actually instructed you the board not to give your views in public so you know some think that's even a violation of something called an open open meetings act i don't know in

107any event what it does is it reflects poorly on how the board operates with superintendent jim lloyd and it's an example i could have said the same thing when i was called up to speak here too so i don't get carried away about that kind of stuff but that's okay continue speaking interestingly a concerned parent was able to attain information from public records requests including texts and emails between the superintendent and board members i don't have time to read those but one of them is kind of important because if superintendent jim thinks the decision was his there's certain exchanges that contradict that and it's the exchanges that might have violated some types of laws it's it's not it's and that's what will remain to be seen but we'll read this one it says jim thanks

108for the heads up although i certainly defer to you to make these decisions because you're much more on the front lines i'm honestly not sure how i'd personally come down on the issue if pressed as a result characterizing the decision as having been made quote with the school board unquote seems like a stretch especially where we haven't heard your full rationale having your back with the community and suggesting that we all decided this together are two different things and i can go on but i don't think i have time so anyway there's more to this than this a board process issue than just this current situation with the masks it's but it is familiar what's going on it it's the tail wagging the dog okay it's it's it's been yes men and yes women nodding

109their heads and deferring and it's not new i'm not talking about even the current board i've spoken to parents teachers former board of education members township trustees and state reps and it's no secret to them even that the way the board has been functioning our school system is not healthy but i'm telling you now there's so much more at stake parents are finally getting more involved because parents care that's why parents actually care and in summary i'm almost done if i need to have time from somebody else can i can i go i interrupted you you should have time thank you what we all want is for the board to do their job and to do it according to the processes and laws that you're supposed to okay they're elected positions we want you to

110represent parents okay all parents and not just defer to the superintendent and have important decisions made on a whim and a text without a public forum we want transparency accountability and consequences when there's wrongdoing that's the way life works we want the board to represent parents and the board to lead the superintendent and not the other way around and this comes from parents i've talked to there's good people here tonight i'm telling you i know that there's concerned people okay and it'd be great to have more people here just to listen and observe and support others expressing their thoughts and concerns like me you know we can all agree or disagree and that's that's your choice but parent and citizen involvement i think is a good thing and i think it's needed more in every

111school and and it seems like it's going to be starting here and i think that's good and uh thank you for listening [Applause] i'm just going to echo some things that some other people say i just moved to ohio just less than three years ago and it was my wife that found this area and this school and this is the place we were going to be then i saw how much your taxes were and i felt like i got kicked in the jimmy but i said you know what to have one of the safest cities in ohio and have a great school district makes it worthwhile so that's why we moved here it's also why i was very upset when the schools had to shut down i realized why that had to take place when

112i realized that it was not primarily going to be an in-school learning year not this year but the previous year i made the decision to take my children out in addition to paying these tremendous taxes fork over some private school money that is hard i am not wildly successful man that's an easy thing to do it's a sacrifice you make so i definitely did feel that i made a conscious decision based on that masking policy or at least in part of it and i felt bait and switched because it was switch right after the school year started after all the long discussions with family with children and that's hurtful i absolutely believe you're doing what you think is the best thing for the right reasons but i guess one thing that would make it more

113clear is you're talking about the elevated risk that makes it necessary if you can define what that risk is the numbers the levels like where do you draw that criteria for when it's necessary when it's not at least people would know what the goal post is or what the yard lines are so yeah transparency i think is all that's really necessary and it would stop kind of the the upset feelings that a lot of people are expressing right now so that's all i have and thank you thank you miss suzanne quarley i could do that for you good evening my name is suzanne corley i wish i didn't have to be here again but um i just wanted to talk to you all again um like everybody else or most of us anyway i was

114so disappointed that the mask mandate was it reinstated and um i know we you know we all have our feelings and we have our sources of information i just shared with you the top 10 reasons why i don't need a mask because i believe the reasons we don't need a mask override the reasons you're justifying having a mask because otherwise our kids will have to be tested and cases are going up and quarantined and what i would like to invite you to do is challenge the premise in which you are operating within so that can be justified when you say well cases are going up and we have to be careful and kids will automatically be quarantined if they're around somebody and i i think that's bogus and there's a lot of information that's now

115available that is accessible to you to address that cases go up to based on testing a lot of people are tested but the toll testing process with the pcr is very arbitrary and the founder of the pcr test his name was carrie mullis i don't know if you've ever listened to any of his talks on youtube or wherever he was horrified that he said the pcr tests were never meant to be used as a diagnostic tool yet we're using them as a diagnostic tool and within that you've probably heard of pcr levels during the height of the covid rampage or whatever last year the the pcr testings were were high in the upper 40s 45. you may have heard this before and then in may right before summertime and we they were miraculously lowered down

116to 20. so if it's higher it means anybody who's ever had a cold a sniffle some kind of coronavirus because they've been around for decades will test positive and then around may when we all took our masks off went through the summer the the pcr level is back down to 20. now school's starting again and the pcr level for testing is up in the high 40s again i just want you to step aside and do some research on this one i don't think we should be we should just say no to the whole premise of what we are engaged in i believe the masks are more detrimental than what you're saying justifying the masks does that make sense um the test we need to quit testing our kids because there's also concerns about the method

117of testing sticking the swab way up to your brain practically it's all ridiculous and i think we've just let go of complete common sense here nobody's challenging this this premise who is making this premise you're well educated able to do research and what i would love to see the school board do is to be our watchdogs and communicate with us about this you we elected you to represent us and instead of being a lap dog so to speak for either the superintendent or the the bureaucracy who's giving us these parameters in which to operate i'm saying stand up to those parameters stand up to them reject them you can do that it takes courage it takes leadership it's the right thing to do we all know that children are not carriers of this the mass

118you read these things asymmet symptomatic people should not be tested and how many times have you tested your kids because they're in the class with somebody else who has a sniffle so what don't test them anymore step out of the system step out of the matrix go back and just let this virus run its course and instead of doing these horrific horrific mandates which are very detrimental to our students both physically and mentally i ask for your cooperation and your help in this matter thank you [Applause] miss crowley i have a question for you um do you advocate your position on this with the other organizations that we have to answer to such as the county board of health the state department of health are you speaking with them as well asking them to do

119research like you've asked us okay i just and i so um our core business is not researching medical pcr tests our core business is educating our students not saying that i understand what you're asking of us but i'm also wondering if it would not also be helpful to uh to speak with the people that that's their job right um we don't ask them to educate our kids so i'm just i was just wondering if you had any conversations with anybody else besides them okay okay thank you very much ms rebecca goal it doesn't sound like i can hear you though you can have mine this is a hot mic i guess it's fine okay i was listening uh when you were talking um so i wanted to um a couple thoughts can you hear me

120okay let's give her a different fight no no because we need our um virtual audience to interview as well thank you oh so the bottom line you were sharing about keeping kids in school and when we talked on the phone you said that same phrase and i think that is a great bottom line of course i just wanted like when i was listening there i was thinking also obviously educating the kids during this big huge thing happening and so what i just jotted to myself and i wanted to say it we have a really big learning curve happening in life right now and we really don't know how ongoing this covett hurdle is and one of the things kids are learning is someone in authority can tell you to put something on your face and

121you have to and someone in authority is could the next step be someone authority can tell you to inject something into yourself and you need to comply and so i just wanted to express that it kind of goes with what i was going to share but and i had more questions as i was listening so i might just need a call again but you know i just our hands completely tied with odh and cuyahoga or you know do we have the ability to see we're not following those guidelines um and then i guess my other question was um when you said someone gave me the authority dr lloyd were you saying the board or the parents gave you the authority for them now the board the board gave through the policy the statutory authority for

122me to determine when at times of elevated risk to um to implement the policy that they approved oh okay okay so again i guess um you know we so well i guess i'll just sorry this was these were jotted notes while i was listening um uh oh that was just making a comment it's not quite the same as a snow day because the covering on the child's face a mood and then um i did want to comment so we were talking about the contributing thinking adults and it's not it's not it's about what's next it's not just olmstead falls and so again i guess i just wanted to emphasize what's happening right now in the u.s i know we all know this is very very serious people losing their jobs over the vaccination discrimination so

123i am concerned about what our kids are actually learning with the mask mandate if you can hear that okay and and that was just jotted while i was listening but if i could just express one other thing or was there something that no you know one of the things that i was going to say is your question was a good one um i am not allowed um to go and do and to say i'm not going to do what the department of health um or the county board of health says i will say personally um that i wish that um uh that antibodies would count and i wish that you know if somebody here's a for instance if somebody has had covid um it's october so if somebody gets coveted in september and is exposed

124again by policy from the from them the county board of health they would be subject to quarantining again i think that's absolutely ludicrous right you know i i think that also that i wish that if somebody were exposed um in uh it you know within that magical arbitrary six foot circle of whatever it may happen to be that um they wouldn't be excluded that they wouldn't be pushed you know out that what they could do is they could come back in and they could have a mask and we would monitor symptoms and we have tests that we could provide their rapid tests but they're 75 percent effective at least as identifying that that they could remain in school the county board of health will not allow me to do that because once they quarantine i

125have a requirement under the ohio revised code to exclude them and i can't i have a license myself i have a mortgage i have nine years left until i retire and i like working here and i don't want to do that so there are things i would think honestly that some of you probably think that i also think that we don't necessarily disagree on that i have to do because it is the way that it is i advocate as well it made what so what i know is if it changes at the ohio state board of health level cuyahoga county will comply there are other counties lorraine summit medina lake that are doing um different things um and that those boards of health have decided to do some of those things that i had just

126mentioned okay ours is not so i i hear i hear you're saying so thanks for that that's helpful i mean i do i'm still a little bit like berea independence a lot of these places aren't doing the math they're not we can yeah and i disagree with them i mean they're colleagues of mine and um i think it comes down to a space issue i'll say that if every classroom that we had was this big so one of the reasons why i'm not wearing a mask is because i mean i've i've told you what my health conditions were before um i feel that i'm a good amount uh a distance away you're all the way over there and it's you know what the rules are like if class was like this i would be able

127to stand and i'd be able to teach to you because we're further not you know far enough away um where i'm able to do that we have classrooms that are 720 square feet within this building and also a little smaller it falls unock some of the other places have bigger things and there's other things that i think as well that i don't know if people are are um you know i don't know if everybody is is providing the information maybe that they have and that's just the nature of the beast at this particular point in time okay i'm not going to chastise what my colleagues down the road are doing or because i i think that they're really good people but we may disagree on some things as well well it seems arbitrary because of

128you know well that's like you know like homecoming and student sections are packed and then it's like but my kids are sitting apart in desks outside so well homecoming wasn't but incoming was not and it wasn't enforced but i'm not worried about that i was happy uh okay so let me just go up can i quickly just you can i'm sorry you asked and i wanted to give you that i appreciate that and i'll be quick because i know we got we have browns and whatnot um okay so um uh i know i just will quickly echo a few things that the four-day change was really difficult i think i expressed that last time i came i came right after if you remember i talked to you and then i came uh because we had

129i had considered homeschooling and so it was like very startling um however uh you know it smells a month and a half 40 hours a week um i guess what i'm putting on here it was scott also mentioned was that it was optional beginning of the year and most parents chose not to so um and and i guess i'm just i'm asking if we don't have to follow the ohio health guidelines if there's any ever any opening i mean i maybe i need to do my own research to figure it out because it feels kind of like well we can't do it our hands are tight but there's got to be a way because like we said some of the other schools aren't so but i hear what you're saying about space i don't i

130don't agree with that okay let me just quickly say this okay um this is this is my main point students uh the concern that i have was what i said about when we're acquiring masks it could quickly we're teaching kids to be required sorry we're teaching kids to just say okay the authority said i should wear a mask so i will i'm concerned about that even possibly at some point point moving over to vaccinations and i was really sort of startled very recently i got info from the disney trip in the eighth grade trip and i'll just quote it word for word students are not required to get vaccinations at this time vaccination status will be a factor if you come in contact with covid similar wedding was for 8th grade trip vaccination status will

131be a factor if your child is exposed vaccination vaccinated students will not need to quarantine that's that's that's a discrimination right there between the two the district the district is strongly leading towards only accepting chaperones that can show proof of vaccination so those are word for word and it sounded discriminatory to me vast and unvaxed it also sounded like unvexed is synonymous with infectious and that's not the case and neither is being unmasked um and it i i just my question was is it possible at some point i think we should keep our eyes open that something could change like that and is there any ways that we can push back on that and also when do we decide to consider medical procedures you know that they weren't an issue of privacy and why would

132we be treating people different if they have extra unbaxed so and then the surgeon a surgeon general just came out today now if you saw it saying a huge statement about masks are of no benefit to kids you know so the public health leadership has been has continued to tell us there's no clinical benefit to messing with children so even though we're talking about quarantines and numbers i still think we should really say but why are we doing this um anyway last last thing i'll say i don't want to take up too much of your time here i just here's what i hear here's my closing statement i don't feel like it's truly about health when kids are given a choice everywhere else except for when they're in school and because of the large amount

133of research being done about physical psychological mental emotional effective masking kids because there's no evidence that masking is effective because the virus affects children an alarmingly small percentage rate because the rules are arbitrary because it violates the freedom of family decision and because it puts an undue burden on kids unmasking our kids and giving them the choice giving families a choice is the healthiest smartest most moral most common sense decision to make so i'm asking to seriously reconsider the adverse effects these decisions are having in our children and respond to our concerns as parents thanks [Applause] coverage to begin with and act as a health commissioner and i'm not comfortable really doing any of that but i accept that responsibility i know that i've talked you know a bit with both principles of agnola and

134principal kers as it relates to student vaccinations that's not anything to me personally that i think should be required for a student i have my own kids and i'll be honest i have two of them got vaccinated and one of them chose not to uh to get vaccinated he may need to because that state is going to require that um for him you know and i'm not a big fan of that sort of thing i'm not a big fan of i think that okay we'll disagree on this but i think vaccinations work i'm vaccinated i also happen to believe that mass health prevent that there's there's research that shows that some would say that it doesn't some would say it does so this is a personal opinion i'm not going to require or ask the

135board to put a policy into place to require students to be vaccinated to go on any trip um as it relates to coven smallpox other things like that that's a little bit different i think than what this is that we're talking about i i will say that i do have a concern about the adults and one of the concerns i have about both them and their kids is if we're down in florida and if we're out in d.c what's going to happen if somebody's required to kind of quarantine and how does that work and honestly who pays for the hotel and who pays you know they're on a bus and i'm worried about those things so for me i don't i would never uh bring anything as it relates to covet 19. he says it

136stands right now to the board to require masking um sorry to require uh vaccinations for students obviously i have for masking but i have not done that for vaccinations nor do i believe that that should be done i i would not uh honestly if you ask me what my opinion is on that as well would you ever bring a required because i haven't had friends that asked me of um that staff members have to come vaccinating they were gonna lose their jobs i don't i wouldn't do that either i don't think that that's um a proper thing to do instead there are things that i agree with um that some people i think would agree with me on some some of you would on those things because that's how i feel but i am worried

137about those trips and i'm worried about what's going to happen if something happens as it relates to kovic 19 and where they're going to go and you know their kids out in dc like you're gonna have to come pick them up if they're in florida i mean i don't you can't fly home if you have if you're positive for coking how are you gonna get home that concerns me and it's one of the reasons why we didn't start to think about that like you cancel those opportunities for kids and then you feel like that's a horrible thing to do i mean i'm sick of this as well i mean i've taken away so many things from kids that it gets me sick education opportunities for athletics i mean i look back to you and i

138think of like all the f all the sports that happened in the spring before that got cancelled and look at where what was done then and what was done now that didn't need to be done but it was done and that's not right but it happened that's my long-winded answer can i have a clarification on something you mentioned under what circumstances would you use a rapid covet test on a student in the school i would never do that because we're not allowed to do that but yeah i didn't mean that like i would i don't think that um anybody from the school ought to be putting anything in anybody's nose that you know unless we have a doctor's order or a nurse's order do those sorts of things and for some of our kids who

139have health needs they would do that i will tell you that we have rapid tests that were provided to us uh through ohio and i talked to one particular parent who asked like agent i'm trying to get tests but i can't get them because they're not around but we have some and i know that uh you know we have those at central office and we have a procedure to distribute those things you know if somebody asks like somebody who's somebody a teacher or parent you call and say i want a rapid test i think that's how it goes down that we provide them i have 200 of them i could get more we wouldn't get them i just want to make sure like we would have notification oh no no no we're not gonna give

140them no no we don't do that nor do i want to get in the business of doing any of that stuff i mean listen you guys are already really irritated and upset with us to begin with and i don't think that we're i don't want to do anything that goes i guess what you would consider further over the line maybe that i'm already over we disagree on where the line is but i wouldn't do that but yeah the rapid that's the ohio department health yeah i don't want any of that that's personal health stuff for you you want to test we'll give you one you want to say what the results are to whoever you go ahead and do that there is requirements though i'm sorry whenever somebody is uh who's been quarantined by the

141department of health in order to come back they have to present um okay i don't think that we have i don't see anybody else on our list uh for uh public comment so we're gonna move on with our agenda we're at our consent agenda uh in our uh in our meeting tonight um so i'll accept a motion from the board for approval of consent agenda items listed in categories four through six is there any discussion on items in categories four through six of the consent agenda from the board i just wanted that but if you could explain dude solutions and the platform that we use started 2009 so we're moving to the new it offers us more features we're doing it now by choice any other discussion from the board you got that uh policy

142about public um input needed to straighten enough i want to thank dr demarco for bringing that because that was not how it was supposed to read he wanted to make certain that there was an opportunity obviously that in practice it's written in the board policy of what it is that you want people um participation and that's there before it was public participation would have been five minutes like in totality yeah that's that's not that's not enough it's never been obviously the practice here it's always mr robson will you please call the role dr demarco mr eckenroad mrs parkowski mrs tomas and mrs newman yes motion carries our next regular board meeting will be uh our work session is november 4th and our regular scheduled meeting is november 18th or those of you that have board

143members that have high school students that is first night of teacher conferences so you might want to consider that in relation to our meeting i do and luckily there's two days that they have teacher conferences um but just so you know if you weren't aware i think those are these meetings are set up before those meaning finalized and so that happens is there any general board discussion at this time from the board i have one thing if no other board member has anything um and so it's my fault that i did not send a reminder to the superintendent and treasurer um we need to do their goals for this year and i think we sort of have lucy talked about doing it tonight and i did not send out a reminder saying hey by the

144way let's finalize the goals so i propose that we finalize those and shore those up at our work session on november 4th so um the superintendent has sent us uh some preliminary goals um and if you don't have those um i can resend those to you and the treasurer um would need to send us something so or that night um but we need to we need to do that so we stay on track with um goals and mid-year touch points and end-of-year reviews so um with the permission of the board we'll put that on the work session agenda for november um typically we don't say that would not be that is so it's it's it's it's been in the past that the superintendent treasurer will send us uh a preliminary um these are the goals

145that i think that um i'd like to focus on this year there's uh usually three typically not four and typically not two three seems like a good sweet spot to focus on sometimes there have been four um and um you know we discuss and you know if the board has any i know for instance the superintendent has two um i spoke with uh dr lloyd and um briefly about it and i said maybe we should think about a third and we can collaborate on that if we want that night or if you have ideas you can discuss my thought was you know just those things that we've been focusing on to provide you with some um guidance on that i'm certainly open or whatever whether it's i mean what i do with our administrative team

146is um two goals and the third there's three goals and the third one is a day-to-day responsibility so kind of thing and then you're valuing based on the context of the job and i'm looking for whatever direction you want to provide and it could be too it it it could i mean you know you don't need to force any goals um we need to be thoughtful in collaborating with our leadership to focus on the right things for the school year so um i hope that gives the treasurer some guidance on how to proceed and and what our thoughtful discussion can be on the fourth all right um if there's no other board discussion um i think we're ready to adjourn at 902 pm i'll accept a motion from the board to adjourn mr robson when

147you're ready can you please call the role dr demarco mr eckenroad mr harkowski yes mrs tomasz and mrs newman yes thank you everyone for your attendance